The maintenance of, and transactions in, real estate are mostly conducted by archaic, inefficient means, namely by person-to-person communications between the owner and the service providers (e.g., tradespeople) or a prospective buyer or a broker. There are very few, if any, homes that have a complete history maintained for them over a significant period of time because it is a manual, paper-intensive process. Most homeowners are not great at keeping records, let alone doing so over long periods of time.
Yet, homeownership for many people represents the single largest, most important investment they will make in their lives. Quite importantly, when a property owner sells its property, good records of work done on the property can have considerable value. Such records may influence how much a buyer is willing to pay for the property.
Somewhat surprisingly, someone searching for a home to purchase has access only to minimal information available about the prospective homes for sale and even less for homes not currently for sale. Once someone purchases a home, the purchaser (except in the case of a new home or in a few exceptional cases) assumes ownership of the home with incomplete information about the home's systems, inventory and the history of services and projects executed on the home.
Accordingly, a need exists for a system that facilitates the input and accumulation of information pertaining to real property, updatable by the owner, under the secure control of the owner and preferably transferable to a potential or actual buyer.
Technology has heretofore been employed only to a quite limited extent to aid prospective or actual home buyers or homeowners. In general, current computing systems supporting real property management are focused on facilitating advertisement and sale of property. The property owner can often post property for sale on-line on a multi-list service. Buyers can search for for-sale properties meeting their criteria.
Some computerized systems can also be used for predicting property values. These computing systems attempt to assess the historical buy/sell information about a home compared to like homes in its area and estimate a present-dollar value for a home. The estimates based on home improvements are not specific to the actual work performed or to the target market of the home nor are the definitions of the home and actual and/or potential improvements transferable to a new buyer of the home. Such numbers cannot provide basis-adjustment data.
Other real estate-related software/computer systems have been developed, such as those incorporating special algorithms for disclosing detrimental conditions affecting property; allowing for managing and preparing documentation for real estate transactions; those for coordinating real estate sales and rentals; etc.
Potential home buyers have many computing systems available to them to research available homes. However, these systems provide few, if any, historical or ancillary details that would aid the potential home buyer in his or her decision-making process. A new tool emerging for homeowners and buyers attempts to facilitate home price comparisons, but price fairness is only one of many factors relevant to a purchase decision.
Some computing systems help homeowners to connect with service providers. These various computing systems include those that provide for posting projects to an open market of providers (e.g., on a web site) who connect with the homeowner if the project interests them. Some also provide tools for the homeowner to review providers by viewing the reviews of other homeowners. These computing systems, however, don't provide a complete, or at least somewhat comprehensive, cohesive, historical view of a home's projects and the results and details of those projects, including who executed the project, which can be shared with other homeowners and/or passed on to subsequent owners of the home.
There are other computing systems supporting documentation of a home's inventory. These computing systems, so far as we are aware, do not provide for the transferal of this information to a new owner; neither do they provide mechanisms to tie into the point-of-sale of goods bought and sold either on-line or otherwise.
Current computing systems thus do not provide a mechanism or methodology for documenting, retaining, presenting and managing real property, its projects, and its contents as an asset which ultimately may be conveyed from the owner of a home to the next purchaser of that home.